


The things I learned from a broken mirror

by wallmakerrelict



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Keith (Voltron), POV Third Person, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 07:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16321688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wallmakerrelict/pseuds/wallmakerrelict
Summary: On their way back to Earth the Voltron lions run out of fuel on a planet wracked by terrible storms. Separated from most of the team and with Krolia missing, Keith must work with Shiro and Pidge to survive the hostile alien world.





	The things I learned from a broken mirror

The little moon looked safe at first glance, with no hint of the trouble to come. A solid surface, survivable temperatures, a breathable atmosphere. All good signs. Keith scanned the ground below from where the Voltron lions hung in orbit. Magnified images of the moon’s surface scrolled on his display. Open landscapes. Red sand. Deep valleys. Rocky plateaus. To him, having grown up in the desert, it almost looked like home. 

“What a desolate place,” said Allura over the com. 

“We can’t afford to be picky right now,” Keith reminded her. Their journey had been more difficult than they’d first anticipated. Not only were several factions of Galra looking for them, but they’d had to contend with the natural hazards of space travel and their lions’ limited power supply. Without the castle to re-charge them, they’d been forced to periodically stop planet-side and perform the delicate process of kick-starting their lions with faunatonium. But there wasn’t always a planet handy when they needed it. That’s how they’d ended up here. Three days ago they’d started looking for a hospitable pit stop, and for three days they’d found nothing. Their power levels were dangerously low. If they didn’t stop here, there was a very real chance that they’d find themselves adrift in space. 

Lance groaned loudly. “I know it’s too much to ask that we find some actual civilization, but I was at least hoping for a planet with something green on it. The closest thing I can see to a plant down there looks like it died before the rise of the Galran Empire.” Keith glanced at his screen. Their scanners were showing them a stand of what had once perhaps been trees. Now they were gargantuan spires rising out of the sand – limbless, black, jagged. They’d been fossilized. 

“Nothing growing means nothing to eat,” muttered Hunk. 

“Stop thinking with your stomach,” Keith snapped. 

“Hey!” Hunk shouted right back. “Our food supply is getting as low as our power levels. I’m not just the hungry guy. I’m trying to keep everyone from starving to death!” 

“Sorry,” Keith sighed. “But this moon is better than anything else we’ve seen lately. We can’t afford to pass it by.” 

Pidge spoke up next. “I don’t know, Keith. My scans aren’t adding up. There clearly used to be life on the surface, and the atmosphere should support new growth. So why is the whole place a wasteland? I’m running some more simulations on the weather patterns…”

Keith flipped a switch on his coms panel to mute the other lions and send a transmission directly to Green. “Shiro, what do you think?” he said. 

A private response came back, audible only to Black. “Your call, leader,” said Shiro. 

Keith huffed a tiny sigh. He knew Shiro was just trying not to undermine him. The team had been through enough without two leaders vying for authority. Shiro was in no condition to lead, anyway, not with what he’d been through so recently. Keith still didn’t know the extent of it, because Shiro wouldn’t talk about it. He didn’t know what Shiro was thinking or feeling. He didn’t know who that person had been who they’d thought was Shiro but was actually Haggar’s pawn. He didn’t know what Shiro remembered – about his past, about his clone’s time with Voltron, about their fight in the cloning facility. 

Maybe Shiro didn’t know yet, either. Maybe that’s why he’d started flying with Pidge: to avoid those kinds of questions. 

Keith re-opened coms and was met with a mish-mash of voices from the rest of the group. Allura, Lance, and Hunk continued to complain with Romelle and Coran chiming in from the background. Keith tried to listen to everyone, but picking out a single thread in the noise was impossible. 

His chair shifted. Krolia was leaning on his seat back near his right shoulder. She stared at the screen display as she listened to the coms, her eyes narrow and her ears pinned back. “Keith,” she said with just a hint of admonishment. “Get them in line.” 

Keith raised his voice to cut through the chatter. “That’s enough! I know it’s not ideal, but it’s all we’ve got. Form up on me and get ready to descend.” 

As the lions tightened their flight pattern and nosed down toward the atmosphere, one or two more potshots about the ugliness of the moon were muttered over the com. Keith looked over his shoulder and sighed. He could still feel the disapproval radiating off of his mother. 

“I don’t like being the one giving orders,” he said, quiet enough that the others wouldn’t hear. 

His seat shifted again as Krolia took her weight off it. She stepped forward so that she was level with Keith, and put a hand on his shoulder. When Keith looked up at her, her expression had softened. “Neither did I,” she admitted. “I used to hate leading missions for the Blades – I preferred solo spy work. But we never had enough senior operatives, so I had to step up from time to time. It’s hard. You can’t just account for your own actions. You have to be responsible for others as well. And your decisions have the potential to affect not just you, but everyone you care about.”

“Yeah…” said Keith quietly. He’d seen some of Krolia’s work with the Blades when he’d shared her memories in the quantum abyss, but it was rare for her to talk about her past out loud. He listened, rapt. 

“But,” said Krolia, “that’s why it’s important to have the strength of your convictions. A team with a weak leader is in more danger than a team with no leader at all. It does no good to sit back and say that you never wanted the responsibility. Either refuse it, and follow. Or accept it, and lead. No half measures.” 

“How do you know you’re making the right decisions?” said Keith. 

Krolia quirked an ironic smile. “You don’t. There might not even be a right decision. All you can do is weigh the risks and the rewards without letting emotion or bias get the better of you. And then trust yourself enough that the others trust you, too.” 

Breaking through the atmosphere was kicking up some turbulence, so Keith turned his eyes forward. The red desert landscape loomed below them. Closer now, it wasn’t as peaceful as it had looked from space. Little dust devils swirled on the surface. Clouds of red particles drifted below, gusting fast and then slow and then fast again. The lower they dropped, the louder the wind became. 

“What the quiznak?” said Allura. 

The dust devils kicked higher and higher, combining into cyclones. The red clouds pelted their lions like hail. A gust of wind hit the Black Lion broadside and Keith had to jerk the controls to keep from being blown off course. 

Too late, he realized that this was no ordinary wind. A storm was brewing around them, building from calm to a gale faster than should have been possible, and they were flying into the middle of it. 

“Pull up!” Keith ordered. He wrestled with the controls. The wind was buffeting him side to side and dragging him down. But slowly, Black rose away from it. Keith glimpsed Yellow beside him, also struggling, but also rising. He scanned his screen again and again, but couldn’t see the others. 

“I can’t!” Lance grunted. 

“Me neither!” said Allura. 

“Where are you guys?” Pidge hollered. 

Yellow and Black, the biggest and heaviest lions, stood a chance against the storm. The others were being swept away. Angling back downwards, Keith finally saw them. Three shapes being spun and thrown about in the red-tinged soup below. 

“Hunk, grab them!” Keith said as he dove back in. 

Hunk replied, “Right behind you!” 

The wind was getting stronger by the second. As Keith descended back into the thick of it, the red dust and sand whipped across his monitors and clouded his vision. He fought to keep control. It had taken only minutes for the little puffs of wind to become a hurricane with rocks in place of water. By white-knuckling the controls he managed to keep all three of the wayward lions in his sight. 

Keith watched as Hunk cut through the storm toward the Blue Lion. Before she could be whisked any further away, he grabbed her with one huge paw and clutched her to his underbelly. His momentum carried him near Green. Pidge poured all her power into a burst of speed to overcome the gale and catch them, clinging to Yellow’s back with Green’s claws. 

“I’ve got Pidge and Allura!” Hunk said. The storm was interfering with their coms, Keith realized, because even at short range Hunk’s voice was crackly with static. “Where’s Lance?”

A squeal of electronic feedback accompanied Lance’s voice as it chimed in. “Guys, a little help?” 

The Red Lion was being bumped about like a shoe in a dryer. Its boosters fired again and again as Lance tried to control its movements, but every time he started to stabilize the wind pushed him off course again. He was being blown away from the rest of the team. 

“Hang on!” Keith shouted as he ran to catch him. 

For a moment Keith feared that he would be caught in the same current that was pulling Lance away. But he managed to hold onto his course. He overshot the Red Lion by a few lengths, turned around, and boosted back toward Hunk. He rammed Red hard enough to make warning lights pop up on his display, but Lance was pushed back toward the group. Hunk grabbed him with his other front paw, mashing him against Allura to hold them both steady. “Ow…” Lance groaned. “Thanks, Keith, but… ow.” 

Keith rejoined the group, perching on Yellow’s back alongside Green. As a solid mass of lions, they had less control but also the wind couldn’t affect them as much. They rolled through the air, slowly falling out of the sky. They had no chance of escaping the atmosphere like this, but at least they weren’t being torn apart by the storm. “Let’s get on the ground,” said Keith. “We’ll find some shelter and wait this out.”

His adrenaline was just beginning to fade when the strongest gust of wind yet hit them, pelting them with rocks the size of grapes. Keith dug in. Hunk held Lance and Allura tighter. Pidge clenched Green’s claws, but they slid down Yellow’s back with a screech of metal on metal. Before anyone could react, Green lost her grip and was gone. Static screamed over the com, and cutting in and out of it could be heard the scream of a teenage girl. 

“PIDGE!” Hunk yelled. 

Keith’s pulse revved back to full speed. “SHIRO!” 

His first instinct was to go after them. Shiro in danger was a powerful force on his mind. He’d always been willing to risk anything, sacrifice everything, without a second thought, to protect him. 

But his responsibility wasn’t just to himself, or even to Shiro. It was to the team. Like Krolia had said, he couldn’t let his emotions carry him down the wrong path. So he assessed it logically. Green was the smallest and lightest of the lions. The most susceptible to the whims of the storm. Likely to be damaged the worst, and carried the farthest away. They couldn’t leave her on her own. But their ungainly ball of four lions was no good for precision flying. They’d be lucky to land safely on the moon’s surface, let alone catch Pidge. And with the way they were positioned, Hunk couldn’t chase Green without letting go of Blue and Red. If he did that, who knew where they’d all end up?

In the end, Keith arrived back at what his instincts had first told him to do, but this time bolstered with the certainty of a sound decision. The entire thought process was done before Keith had finished shouting Shiro’s name. 

“Stay together!” Keith said to the others as he let go of Yellow and turned to chase down Green. 

The storm was so bad now that he immediately lost sight of Yellow behind him and Green ahead. His screens were swirling dust. His sensors were useless. The controls jumped and jerked in his hands as the wind pummeled his lion. He steadied his hands and burned thrusters in the direction he’d last seen the Green Lion go. 

“Pidge! Shiro! Where are you?!” he shouted. 

Pidge’s voice fuzzed in and out through the com, unintelligible. 

Something big struck the side of his lion, rolling them over in the sky and making his impact alarms blink up again. He shook off the hit and called out again, “I can’t see you! Pidge, come in!” 

There was no answer. For an awful second, Keith thought he’d lost them for good. Then Krolia leaped forward and pointed. “There!” she cried. 

Then he saw it. A glimmer in the rusty swirling darkness. He followed it, struggling to keep a straight path. The glimmer grew brighter and brighter, dancing and flickering like a candle flame. Finally, he drew close enough to make out the source. The Green Lion was tumbling chaotically through the storm, flashing like a disco ball. Pidge had turned on all of her exterior lights to guide Keith to her. 

“I’ve got you! I’ve got you!” Keith shouted as he closed the last of the gap. It wasn’t just wind thumping against him now. More impacts were registering on all sides as large rocks and debris were thrown against the lions. Some were nuisances. Some hit hard enough to jolt Keith painfully in his seat. He could see that Green was taking a beating, too. It was as if they were in the crossfire of a Galra dogfight, except Keith couldn’t see which way the enemy was to dodge them. 

As he sailed within reach of Green, he reached out to grab her like Hunk had done with the others. But the turbulence kept them just too far apart. He overshot, turned around, and tried again. This time Black’s claw managed to snag Green’s back foot. But Keith couldn’t get a hold on it, and the lions spun apart again. 

Third try. He missed with his claws, but Green managed to hook her tail around Black’s foot and anchor herself for just a second. Keith took the opportunity. He was at the wrong angle to grab Green with his claws, so he twisted around and closed his teeth on the back of her neck like a mother cat picking its baby up by its scruff. The force of their spinning tried to rip them apart, but Keith finally had a good hold and he wasn’t letting go. 

He couldn’t tell which way was up or down, but in the moments when his sensors broke through the interference he saw that they were losing altitude. Green alone might have been carried by the storm for miles, but together with Black’s weight they were able to descend. They would be safer on the surface. 

“You guys okay?” said Keith. 

Even this close there was static, but at least they could hear each other. “That was a wild ride!” Pidge laughed manically. “Nice catch, though.” 

“Good thinking with the lights,” said Keith. “Let’s get on the ground. Then we can find the others.”

Shiro’s voice crackled over the com, “Keith, look out!” 

Black was facing the wrong way. Keith didn’t see it until it was too late. A massive cylinder of blackened stone – one of the fossilized tree trunks they’d spotted from orbit – flew through the air and collided with the lions. Keith grunted as he was nearly thrown out of his chair. 

When he straightened back up, he found that his controls barely responded and his altimeter was plummeting. The tree trunk had wedged itself in the gap between the lions and its weight was dragging them down at a dangerous speed. Keith wrenched at the controls, but it was no use. There was too much extra weight hanging at too odd an angle. He had no control, no chance of landing them safely. It was going to be a bad crash. 

“I’ll take care of it,” said Krolia in his ear. Keith couldn’t spare the attention to wonder what she meant, but when he looked over his shoulder he was alone in the cockpit. 

For a few seconds, while they fell, he tried to figure out where she had gone. Then he saw her. She was just visible out the corner of his viewscreen, helmet on, face shield up, crawling on the exterior of the Black Lion through a hailstorm of rock. She dodged a piece of flying debris. Another hit her, but she dug her claws in and kept her grip. 

Keith linked the Black Lion to her helmet communicator and shouted, “What are you doing?!” 

Krolia didn’t answer. Through her channel all he could hear was the wind, the thump of rocks hitting metal all around, and Krolia’s grunts of exertion as she made her way toward where the tree was stuck. When she reached it, she planted her back against the Black Lion and her feet against the tree and she heaved at it until her grunts turned into roars. 

They were spiraling out of control. The tree wasn’t moving. “Keith?!” came Pidge’s panicked voice over the com. 

“Brace for impact!” Keith told her. 

With a grinding of rock on metal that Keith could feel in his teeth, the tree budged. Krolia screamed and gave it a mighty kick. It broke free of its berth between the lions and spun off into the clouds. The controls jumped in Keith’s hands as they became responsive again. He pulled back on them with all his strength, pouring the last of the Black Lion’s power into braking against their fall. 

They slowed. Their speed ebbed from catastrophic to deadly. From deadly to dangerous. From dangerous to merely painful. They were going to make it. 

Krolia clung to the outside of the Black Lion. There was no time for her to get back inside, so she dug her claws into the chinks between the metal panels and held on for life. Keith angled the lion so she wouldn’t be crushed under it when they landed. 

There she was, wind-swept, sand-blown, body bent against the onslaught like a steel beam. 

Keith looked away for a fraction of a second to see the ground coming up under them. 

He looked back. 

Krolia was gone. 

The lions hit the ground in a spray of sand with a sound like an explosion. One moment Keith was in his seat, and the next he was lying on the floor of the cockpit. The lights of the display guttered and faded as the last of the Black Lion’s power drained away. Keith was left in darkness. 

He scrambled to his feet, ignoring his bruises. “Krolia?” he shouted. The Black Lion was down for the count, but the com in his helmet was still active. He heard no answer, not even ambient noise, not even static. He leaped towards the exit. He felt like he was breathing against a vice. His feet didn’t seem to touch the ground, numb with sheer panic. “ _Krolia?!_ ” 

He opened the door and was met with a wall of wind and dirt. It slapped him in the face so hard that he staggered back and almost fell. This was beyond any sandstorm he’d ever experienced in the desert. It was more like the tornadoes he’d read about in school, the kind that chewed up houses, roads, and bodies like a blender. Looking out into that carnage, some part of him knew that he should stop and think. But in that moment, he wasn’t the leader of Voltron. He was a little boy. A building was burning. And his father was running back inside. 

“MOM!” Keith screamed as he staggered out of his lion and into the storm. His voice was swallowed by the gale as soon as it left his mouth. The wind grabbed him and tried to drag him in ten different directions. He instantly lost sight of his lion as dust swirled in front of his helmet like a kaleidoscope. Sand pelted him from all sides. It stung like needles in the gaps of his armor. Larger rocks bounced off his body, spinning him this way and that. Within seconds he’d lost his bearings completely. 

Still, he ran against the wind with all his strength. He didn’t know which direction Krolia might be, so he just focused on moving forward at any cost. Even in the haze of his panic he knew his mission was hopeless. He would have had to be standing on her in order to see her. If she was a hundred yards away, she might as well have been a hundred miles. But turning back never once crossed his mind. 

A rock the size of a baseball slammed into his thigh, forcing him to his knees. Another hit him in the gut just below his chest plate and drove the air out of his lungs. Reflex made him throw a hand up to shield his eyes. A third rock bounced the hand against his helmet, and he felt something crack. 

“Mom…” he choked out as he tried to catch his breath. He got his feet under him and was halfway to standing when something wrapped around him from behind and dragged him back down. He thought it was some new trick of the storm until he heard Shiro’s voice. 

“Pidge! I got him! Reel us in!” 

“No, no!” Keith coughed. His back was pressed against Shiro’s chest, pinned there by Shiro’s arm locked across his shoulders. He tried to stand, but his feet just kicked futilely in the dirt as he was dragged backwards toward the lions. He clawed at Shiro’s arm. Shiro wouldn’t let go. “No! She’s out there!” 

Shiro didn’t bother arguing with him. He just held on while a cable attached to his suit towed them through the sand and back to the shelter of the Green Lion. Pidge was waiting at the door to help hustle them both inside. She slammed it behind them. The deafening roar of the storm was quieted to a distant howling. 

Keith reached for the door with a cry like a wounded animal. Shiro caught him by the back of his armor and threw him against the far wall. “Stop!” he panted. “You can’t go back out there!”

“She fell…” Keith babbled, pushing off the wall to try again. Shiro moved to block him. “She saved us and she fell. Into the storm. I gotta find her!” 

Shiro let Keith crash into him and met him with a steadying embrace. “Keith, listen to me. She’s Galra. She’s tough. She’ll survive this.”

“Don’t you promise me that. You don’t know!” Keith ducked out from under Shiro’s arm and ran for the door again. 

This time Pidge stepped in front of him. She pressed her back to the door and hunched her shoulders with all her determination. Her voice wavered a little as she said, “Don’t do it!” 

“Out of my way!” Keith growled as he tried to sweep her aside. 

Before his hands could connect, she ran inside his swing and shoved him, hard. Pidge’s skinny little body hit him hard enough to make him take two steps back. It was so unexpected that it forced him to pause for the first time since they’d crashed. 

“Don’t be stupid!” Pidge shrieked at him. “If you go out there, you’ll die!” 

He stood frozen, shaking with frustration and despair. Pidge stood in front of him, poised to dive at him if he tried to get past her again. He could feel Shiro behind him, ready to grab him. They were right. He couldn’t go back outside. They were stuck in here. With a roared curse, Keith tore his helmet off and threw it as hard as he could against the wall. 

As it left his hand, pain lanced from his fingertips to his elbow. He gasped and stared down at his arm. When he flexed his fingers, the pain flared again and he thought he felt something grinding inside his pinky. One by one, his other injuries declared themselves. Every muscle in his body was burning with the exertion of flying and then running through the storm. He could feel deep bruises spreading on his thigh, under his ribs, a couple on his back. The crook of his elbow stung like a burn. He looked down at it to find the fabric of his body suit torn there. The storm had attacked the exposed skin like sandpaper. His head hurt. He wasn’t sure if that was from the shock or because he’d hit it at some point. He felt like throwing up. Pretty sure that was the shock. 

He staggered to the nearest flat surface and sat down. Shiro and Pidge visibly relaxed. 

“What do we do?” he said, mostly to himself. His voice sounded flat and foreign. 

Pidge leaped to answer. She dragged her computer out of the mess that was her bed and started typing away on it. “My lion has been collecting data since we broke atmosphere,” she explained. “Looks like the storm came out of nowhere and built in strength extremely quickly. But the wind speeds topped out while we were still in the air, and the average is holding pretty steady now, so I think this is the worst of it. Now we just have to wait it out.” 

Keith looked around for the first time since he’d entered. The lights were on. “The Green Lion still has power,” he said. 

Pidge shook her head. “Barely. Enough to run some auxiliary systems for the next few hours. Not enough to get her moving.” 

“We could recharge…” 

This time Shiro answered. “Coran has the faunatonium,” he said. “And we don’t know where the others ended up.” 

“How long until the storm ends?” 

Pidge winced. “I’m still running some simulations to try to figure that out, but the short answer is that I have no idea. And there’s one more problem. I have some snacks and a little bit of water stashed in here, but Hunk has our main food supply.” 

Keith rested his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. 

A hand squeezed his shoulder. He opened his eyes to find Shiro kneeling in front of him. “It’ll be okay,” he said. 

Any other time, Keith would have been happy to fall into Shiro’s optimism. Today, he resented the lie. He knocked Shiro’s hand off his shoulder and looked away. “Don’t,” was all he said. Shiro backed off, looking stung. 

They waited. 

Shiro slept. Keith couldn’t help but glance over every few minutes to check on him where he lay curled up on his side, his breath coming slow and even, his eyes moving a little under their lids. He’d slept a lot since he came back from the Black Lion’s inner world – Allura said his body was still recovering from the transfer. Keith didn’t begrudge him the rest, though he wondered how he could sleep with all the noise. The wind howled just outside and debris beat the Green Lion like a drum. 

Pidge sat in the corner and clicked away on her computer, the screen illuminating her face like a ghost. Every now and then, when a particularly large piece of debris hit the Green Lion hard enough to shake it, Pidge would flinch and then pat the wall behind her as if reassuring it. She said nothing. Either she was too focused on her work for speech, or maybe she sensed that Keith didn’t want her to talk to him. 

Keith sat with his back against the foot of Pidge’s bed, out of both of their lines of sight, and unclipped his armor piece by piece. Now that he could feel all his bruises, it took a long time. Some of the clasps were in places that his sore muscles couldn’t reach without twinging and cramping. But he wouldn’t wake Shiro, and he didn’t feel like asking Pidge for help. 

He saved his left hand for last, and swallowed hard to keep from making a sound as he pulled his gauntlet off. His whole hand was a mottled bruise. His pinky was definitely broken. Probably the ring finger, too. But they weren’t crooked, just swollen and throbbing. 

Quietly so as not to attract unwanted questions, he rummaged around in the clutter at the foot of Pidge’s bed. It would have been too much to hope for a medical kit in there, but he was satisfied to find a roll of electrical tape. He coiled it around his hand, binding the injured fingers to his middle finger to keep them stable. It looked terrible but he didn’t have the focus to spare on caring. 

Time passed strangely. The soft interior lights of the Green Lion’s hold gave no hint as to whether it was day or night. Keith paced and tried to decide whether the wind sounded like it was dying down. It didn’t. 

Finally, too exhausted to resist, he lay down on Pidge’s bed. He thought he’d be asleep in an instant, but he couldn’t seem to get his brain to slow down long enough to doze off. And every time his exhaustion threatened to overcome his anxiety, the storm threw something against the Green Lion and the resulting _boom_ snapped him back awake. He was no stranger to insomnia. He knew eventually his body would give in, or if it didn’t at least lying down was no more or less boring than pacing. So he curled up, closed his eyes, and stayed there for what felt like hours.

He was still awake when he heard Shiro stir across from him. He cracked one eye to watch him sit up, stretch, and stand. He looked as tired as Keith felt. Keith resolved to say something – to express his concern, to apologize for the way he’d spoken to him earlier, anything – but instead when Shiro glanced his way he closed his eye again and pretended to be asleep. 

Shiro crossed to where Pidge was still hunched up, tapping at her computer. “How long was I out?” Keith heard Shiro say. 

“About four hours,” said Pidge.

“Any change with the storm?”

“No.”

“How’s Keith?”

“He passed out an hour ago,” said Pidge. 

There was a pause. Keith almost opened his eyes to see what was going on, but he was pretty sure Shiro was looking at him and he didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping. He kept them closed. 

“What about you?” said Shiro finally. “You get any sleep?”

“Not yet.” 

“Pidge, take a break.” 

“I will,” said Pidge. “I just want to try to finish this before Keith wakes up.” 

That got Keith’s attention, but he lay still so as not to give away that he’d heard. 

Shiro sounded interested, too. “What are you working on?”

Pidge’s typing stopped, and Keith was pretty sure she was showing Shiro her screen. “Galra flight suits have a unique energy signature,” she said. “The Green Lion mapped Krolia’s back when she first joined us. If I can boost my sensors enough, maybe I can find her. Or at least get an idea of how far away she is.” 

“Good thinking,” said Shiro. “You still need to rest eventually.”

“I’m okay,” Pidge said. 

Shiro’s voice was soft when he said, “Are you?” 

There was a long pause this time. Finally, the silence was broken by a quiet sniffle from Pidge. “I keep thinking about my mom,” she said. “After Kerberos, I was so wrapped up in how I felt about losing Dad and Matt. But she lost them, too. And then I ran away. I left her alone. I never got to talk to her or explain. And now we’ve lost three years. Anything could have happened back on Earth. Seeing Keith that way… If it was my mom, I don’t know what I’d do.” 

Keith didn’t need to look to know that Shiro was giving Pidge a hug. That’s just how he was. 

“I met Colleen a couple of times,” said Shiro. “Did you know that?” 

“Uh-uh,” said Pidge’s muffled voice. 

“Yeah, when I was working with your dad. No offense, but she’s the toughest person in your family.”

That surprised a laugh out of Pidge. “No offense taken,” she said. 

“Whatever happened on Earth in the last three years, I know she got through it just fine. She’s going to be so happy to see you when we get back.” 

Pidge sounded like she felt better when she said, “Are you going to see your mom back on Earth?”

Keith’s heart seized up, because he knew the answer. 

“She died when I was little,” said Shiro. 

“Oh,” Pidge said. Then she gasped. “Oh! I think I knew that. Dad mentioned once that your grandfather raised you.” 

“That’s right.” 

Pidge stammered, “I’m so sorry. I’ve been talking about myself… I should have remembered.” 

“It’s okay,” said Shiro. “It was a long time ago.” 

Keith recognized in Shiro’s voice the same walls he’d put up around his own heart. Both of them pretending that if they spoke about their loss little enough, briefly enough, matter-of-factly enough, that it couldn’t hurt them. As if that hurt hadn’t already carved out a home inside them.

“Get some sleep, Pidge,” said Shiro. “Don’t wake Keith. You can have my bed for now.”

“Give me another hour. I’ll sleep when I have this done.” 

“Deal.” 

Their voices ceased. Pidge’s typing resumed. The sound of her keys clicking was no longer just part of the distracting swirl of background noise – it was the sound of hope. He decided to lie still for a few more minutes so the others wouldn’t know he’d been faking. As soon as he forgot that he’d originally been trying to fall asleep, sleep snuck up on him and took him. 

\-----

Keith hadn’t witnessed his father’s heroic charge into the blaze that killed him. He’d been in school. They’d pulled him out of class and sat him in the principal’s office. He’d thought he was about to get in trouble. He hadn’t yet known that trouble soon wouldn’t have meaning for him, because no authority could ever think up a punishment worse than what the social worker would say to him. 

In the upheaval of confusion and grief that followed, he hadn’t asked many questions. It wasn’t until years later that he realized he didn’t know what sort of building it was that his father had died in. It might have been an office, or a storefront, or a barn. 

But in his dreams, it was always a home. And in his dreams, he was always there to witness it. 

This time he was inside the house. The fire roared all around him, licking up the walls, caving in the floor, making the beams smoke and split. He stood among wisps of glowing ash in a rain of hot embers. Flames engulfed him. He tried to run, but his movements were floaty and clumsy and took him nowhere. He knew that he was burning. It hurt in the way that dreams hurt, where the sensation is muddled but the terror is real. 

“Keith!” said a voice. His father was coming to rescue him. 

“Don’t come in!” he tried to scream. It came out as less than a whisper. 

The crunch of wood, barely audible over the sound of the fire, told Keith that the front door had been smashed in. Footsteps pounded the floor of coals. They came closer and closer. The louder Keith tried to scream his warnings, the quieter his voice became. 

The footsteps rounded the corner and a figure entered the room where Keith stood. But it wasn’t his father. It was Krolia. 

“Keith!” she called, searching, desperate. 

“I’m here!” His voice was back, but she didn’t seem to hear him. She looked this way and that, unable to see him though he was standing right in front of her. 

“Keith, where are you?” she cried. 

“I’m here! Mom, I’m right here!” She was almost close enough to touch. He reached his hand out. Flames flowed between his fingers like water, but his skin didn’t burn. 

Krolia did. The fire caught on her clothes and in her hair. She didn’t seem to notice. She just kept calling out for Keith as she burned up like paper. Her form crinkled and peeled at the edges, then disappeared in the swirl of the flames. Her face, wreathed in fire, turned unseeing eyes toward him and screamed his name. 

“Keith,” said a softer voice from outside the dream. 

Keith opened his eyes. 

He was lying among Pidge’s jumbled blankets and knickknacks. The hold of the Green Lion glowed softly with a cool light. The roar of the fire became the roar of the wind outside. The crack of splintering wood became the pop of rocks bouncing off the lion’s exterior. His hand ached. The dream relaxed its hold on him. Reality sunk its claws back in. 

Shiro was kneeling by the side of the bed, his hand gently shaking Keith’s arm, his eyes soft and concerned. Keith glanced at him for only a second before looking away. He’d never been able to hide from Shiro. If he looked at him for too long, all the emotions he was trying to tame would come tumbling out. 

“You okay?” Shiro murmured. 

Keith wondered if Pidge was listening in. Shiro saw his eyes flick up to the corner where she’d been sitting. 

“She’s asleep now,” he said. “Were you dreaming?” 

Keith almost resented how well Shiro could read him. He was a quiet sleeper – he knew this about himself because after a couple of months at the group home, watching some of the other kids thrash and whimper and sleepwalk at night, he’d asked one of the boys there whether he ever did any of those things. The boy said he didn’t. No one had even been aware that Keith was having nightmares. But somehow Shiro could always tell. 

Keith stared at the ceiling and said, “I don’t remember.” 

A stab of pain went through his hand, bad enough that he picked it up and looked at it. His fingers had swelled more, constricting themselves inside their tape wrap, and the tips were turning blue. His skin was tingling like the whole hand had fallen asleep. 

Shiro’s eyes widened when he saw it, but he didn’t cluck over Keith like a mother hen. He just said, “Let me help you with that?” and then waited for Keith to give him his hand. 

Keith held his wrist steady with his free hand while Shiro unwrapped the tape. It stuck and pulled, and as the blood flowed back into the oxygen-starved skin it throbbed like it was being beaten with a hammer. Keith closed his eyes and breathed through it. Pain was good. Pain was simple. It grounded him. If his mind was occupied with how much his hand hurt, it couldn’t spin off in other directions. 

When the last of the tape was gone, Shiro opened a hatch in the wall and pulled out a medical kit. He wrapped Keith’s fingers back up with gauze padding and some kind of self-adherent shell. It wasn’t the prettiest bandage, since Shiro had had to do it one-handed, but it was much more comfortable than the coil of tape. 

“Thanks,” said Keith. He could feel Shiro’s eyes on him. He turned his head away. 

Shiro studied him for a moment, then turned to sit on the edge of the bed facing away from Keith. Keith relaxed. It was easier to avoid eye contact this way, but he could still feel Shiro’s steadying presence beside him. 

“I’d do anything to make this turn out alright for you,” said Shiro. 

“You can’t,” said Keith. He regretted sounding petulant, but he didn’t know how to accept the comfort Shiro was trying to give him. He didn’t want comfort. He wanted to hang on to the numbness that pain and loss had taught him. 

Shiro bowed his head. “I know,” he said. “But I’m here, okay?” 

That Shiro was here meant the entire world to him, and at the same time it made absolutely no difference. The storm didn’t care that they were together. Shiro’s love for Keith wouldn’t keep Krolia alive. 

Keith wasn’t sure what he was opening his mouth to say until, “I did this to us,” fell out. “No one else liked this moon. I brought us here. It’s my fault.” 

Shiro’s back tensed as if Keith’s words were causing him physical pain. “You didn’t know,” he said. 

“I should have.”

“I would have done the same,” Shiro protested. “It looked good from orbit. We needed to stop. If it had been my call, I would have gone down, too.” 

Keith shook his head. He said, “But it wasn’t your call. It was mine. It’s on me.” Saying it didn’t even make his chest tighten or his voice crack. It wasn’t self-pity. It was just true. 

Shiro sighed, and then he was silent for a stretch. When he spoke again, his voice was calm and sure. “You can’t control everything that happens. Just your response to it. The fact that the others stayed together – that’s on you. The fact that Pidge and I aren’t splattered against a cliff halfway to the other side of this moon – that’s on you. The rest isn’t your fault.” He turned just a little, not enough to look Keith in the eyes but enough that the soft light caught his face in profile, and he rested his hand on Keith’s chest. “I wanted you to lead because I knew you’d be good at it. I never meant for you to take the weight of the whole world on your shoulders.” 

The feelings he’d been running from started to catch up with him, and they tugged at his chest like hooks. He heard his voice shake as he whispered, “I just found her.”

Shiro closed his eyes, the green light like dew on his lashes. “I know,” he said. 

“All my life I thought it was my fault she left,” said Keith. The words burned in his throat. He gulped air to keep from choking. “I can’t lose her again. It can’t be my fault this time.” 

Shiro opened his mouth, probably to speak some hollow reassurance. He closed it again. His hand rested heavier on Keith’s chest, his fingertips pressing in. Its weight was an anchor. His touch was the only thing holding Keith together. 

Keith lifted his hand. He couldn’t grab onto him with his bandaged fingers, so he rested his knuckles on Shiro’s back. “Shiro?” he requested.

Shiro took the permission to finally turn and look at him. 

Keith reached up with both hands. “Please…” he whispered. 

Shiro lowered himself down between Keith’s arms and let him squeeze their bodies together. He hooked his arm behind Keith’s neck and held him close. Keith nodded his face against Shiro’s shoulder, muffling his breathing in the fabric of his flight suit. Every breath in was a gasp. Every breath out shook his whole body. Not crying. But as near to it as he would allow himself to come.

Keith grabbed his injured wrist with his uninjured hand to lock his arms behind Shiro, silently begging him not to let go. Shiro seemed to melt against him. Even after Keith’s breathing had finally evened out and his grip had relaxed, Shiro seemed to sense that Keith needed him not to pull away. Instead they shifted into a more comfortable position – Shiro lying beside and a little on top of him, his arm as Keith’s pillow. 

Keith curled up against him and was instantly asleep. This time, he didn’t dream. 

\-----

When Keith woke, he was alone in the bed. He rolled over to find Shiro and Pidge sitting on the opposite bed, sharing food from a small stash. The light was no different in the hold than it had been before Keith fell asleep. Without the sun to tell him night from day, it was hard to know how long he’d slept and whether he should still be tired. 

He held up his hand and beckoned with two fingers. Pidge tossed him one of the bars of tasteless protein that they were eating. Holdovers from the Castle kitchen, and the only things that didn’t spoil when forgotten in a storage locker for weeks. They’d distributed the non-perishable food among the lions. The rest of their supply was with Hunk, who was the only one qualified to turn it into edible meals. Although Keith was starting to see the problem with that approach. 

Pidge confirmed his fear. “That’s the last of it,” she said, pointing to the protein bar in Keith’s hand. 

Keith bit off a corner. It didn’t taste like much, but he’d need the calories soon. “I have a couple more over on the Black Lion,” he said. 

“Won’t last us long,” said Pidge. 

“It doesn’t need to,” said Keith. “Just until we find the others.” 

“How are we going to do that?” Shiro wondered. 

“I’ll figure that out later,” said Keith. He swallowed the last of the protein bar, stood up, and stretched. His body, if possible, was even more stiff and sore than before. But at least it was rested, and Keith knew from experience that he would feel better once he was up and moving around. “First I’m going to go find Krolia.” 

Shiro stood. “Keith, wait…” he said, holding up his hand. 

Keith didn’t let him finish his warning. “Listen,” he said, pointing to the hull. The wind was still audible, but it was whistling instead of howling. “The storm is getting weaker.” 

Pidge dove off the bed toward her computer. She scanned the readings there for only a few seconds before looking up and saying, “He’s right. Wind speeds have slowed to seventy-five kilometers per hour. We’re getting fewer impacts from debris, and the average force is down to…” 

“What does that mean?” said Shiro, swiping his hand down his face with a sigh. 

Pidge shrugged. “It’ll suck, but it won’t kill him,” she said. 

Shiro turned back to Keith. “I’ll go,” he said. But he looked like he already knew that he was going to lose that argument. 

“You were recently dead. You have one arm.” Keith took a deep breath. “And she’s _my_ mom.” 

Pidge flitted back and forth between the hold and the cockpit, and in and out of her piles of junk, while Shiro helped Keith put his armor back on. They had two working hands between them, so they managed it with only a little clumsiness. Shiro clicked the last clasp into place – the one on Keith’s left side and towards his back, where his good hand couldn’t quite reach – and gave him a gentle pat over his cuirass to let him know that it was done. 

By that time, Pidge had collected what she needed. She approached them with a metal box and what looked like a remote control with pieces of another, broken, remote control glued onto it. She handed them to Keith. 

“That’s a sensor I built,” she said, pointing at the broken remote. “It’s set to pick up on the energy signature from Krolia’s suit. I was going to put the software into the Green Lion’s system, but the range for all our equipment is decimated by this storm. You’ll have to carry it with you. It’ll activate if you get close enough to her.” 

“How will I get back? That cable you used before?” 

Pidge shook her head. “The cable’s just a safety line for short-range EVAs, it’s not long enough.” She opened the box in Keith’s hand and pulled out a lump of electronics the size and shape of a smushed ping-pong ball. The box was full of them. “These are communications relays. They’ll boost our signal through the storm. Drop one when the signal starts to get weak, and it’ll keep your helmet com linked up to the Green Lion. I’ll tell you where to go.” 

Keith tucked the gifts under his arm so he could free up his hand to clasp it on Pidge’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he said. 

“She might be your mom,” Pidge told him, “but you don’t have to do this alone. We’re behind you all the way, leader.” 

This time, when Keith stepped out into the storm, the wind was a nuisance rather than a hazard. Sand still whipped at him from every direction, and the occasional gust still made him stagger and flail, but he wasn’t in danger of being picked up or smashed with a boulder. The visibility was a little better, too. He made it several yards before losing sight of the Green Lion in the dust. 

“Pidge, Shiro,” he tested the com. “You there?”

“We’ve got you, Keith,” said Shiro’s voice. 

Keith peered out into the storm. There were no landmarks, no signs. Just solid, swirling red. “Which way?” 

“Don’t know,” said Pidge. “Just pick a direction and keep an eye on that sensor.” 

Keith ducked his head against the wind and trudged forward. Sooner than he’d expected, Pidge’s voice chimed in again. 

“Your signal is starting to break up,” she said. Sure enough, Keith could hear the beginnings of static in her transmission. “Backtrack a few feet and drop a relay.” 

When Keith took one of the little ping-pong balls out of the box and placed it on the rocky ground, it came to life with a digital ping and a metallic snap. It had engaged little claws to clamp it to the rock and prevent it from being blown away. Keith kept walking. “Good?” he said. 

“Perfect,” Pidge replied. “I’ll let you know when to drop the next one.” 

After he had gone as far in one direction as Pidge calculated it was likely for Krolia to have been thrown, he turned in a wide arc and headed back toward the lions. Pidge directed him so that he wasn’t covering the same ground twice. The com relays went down in a wide grid, filling in the space around the lions with paths for their transmissions to cut through the interference of the storm. It was slow going. At first, Keith felt better as the activity warmed up his muscles and made him forget his aches. But eventually the storm took its toll on him and his feet started to drag. 

“How are we doing?” said Keith as he attached another relay to the rock. 

“You’ve covered about 60% of the area,” said Pidge. “How are you holding up?”

Keith answered on behalf of his equipment instead of himself. “I’m running low on these com relays. I only have three left, and I’m dropping one of those now.” 

“I was afraid of that. When you run out, you’ll have to go back and pick some of them up so we can re-use them on new ground.” 

The idea of going back the way he came made Keith want to lie down in the sand and never get up. He checked the remote control hanging on his belt. It was as quiet as always. 

“Keith,” said Shiro. “You’ve been out there a long time. Come in and take a break.” 

“I can keep going,” said Keith. 

Pidge’s voice again. “Shiro’s right. The wind is picking up again. You should come inside.” 

Static popped a couple of times as she said it, so Keith dropped another relay as he continued forward. 

“Did you hear us?” said Shiro. 

“I hear you. I’m not coming back until I find her.” 

“Keith, please,” said Pidge. “It’s getting bad out there.”

He didn’t need Pidge to tell him that. He could feel the wind gusting harder against his body. The whipping sand was stinging him again, and mixing in with it were occasional larger pebbles that bounced off his armor with loud _clacks_. All the more reason not to turn back. If his window to search was closing, he couldn’t risk getting stuck inside again when Krolia was still out here somewhere. 

He dropped his last relay. 

“I can do this,” he gasped as he staggered onward. 

“I know you can,” said Shiro. “Just come back safe, okay?” 

The red sand lashed around him, battering him like fire that burned without consuming. He fought his way deeper into the storm. The next time the Green Lion tried to contact him, their voices were so chopped up by static that Keith couldn’t make out a single word. He was beyond the range of the relays. 

He looked back. The storm blew harder. 

He continued forward. 

A light flashed at the level of his waist. He looked down. A bulb on the sensor Pidge had given him had come on, and it was blinking steadily. He unclipped it and held it in front of his face. Another step forward, and the light blinked a little faster. “Mom?” he called out, hardly daring to hope for an answer. 

Almost as if it could sense how close he was, the wind kicked up around him and tried to force him backwards. He ran into it full tilt. When the light responded, he ran faster. When it flagged, he slowed and readjusted until it blinked strong again. 

He was beginning to feel like he was running in circles when he saw it. A pink glow against matte black – just a sliver of it, just different enough from the surrounding sand to stand out. He dropped to his knees and began to dig. 

Krolia was lying in the lee of a little outcrop, sheltered from the worst of the wind. From the way she was curled up against the rock, she must have crawled there after her fall. The sand had flowed around her, shoring up against her like a snowdrift until she was almost invisible. Another hour and Keith might never have found her. 

He pulled her out of the sand and laid her on her back. “Mom?” he said, shaking her gently by the shoulders. But she didn’t answer. “Mom?!” 

Krolia’s eyelids flickered. Her helmet com crackled to life as it picked up her voice. Just a wordless groan at first, then a slurred, confused, “Keith?” 

There was no time for relief. The wind was rising and Keith finally felt how alone and exposed they were out here. He hoisted Krolia into a standing position, her arm around his shoulder, his good hand around her waist. She was just conscious enough to stagger a little, but not enough to support her own weight. Keith dragged her in the direction he thought he had come from while the wind threatened to lift them both off their feet. 

He knew he was back in the relays’ area of effect because Pidge and Shiro’s frantic voices reappeared in his helmet with him. He interrupted them to shout over the howling wind, “Guys, I found her!” 

“Keith!” said Shiro. “Get inside! Now!” 

“Which way?” 

Pidge hopped onto the channel to guide Keith in. Every relay he passed was a landmark for her to track him. She pointed him back on track whenever the wind tried to blow him the wrong way. 

“You’re close now!” said Pidge. “Keep going, dead ahead!” 

But Keith was slowing even as the storm around him quickened. Krolia weighed heavier and heavier on him, her feet dragging more and more as she slipped in and out of semi-consciousness. She almost slid out of his grasp. He hoisted her arm back onto his shoulder. She sank against his grip. He tried to grab her with his left hand, forgetting his broken fingers, and the pain was so sharp and sudden that he almost dropped her. His legs which were tired before were now on fire. 

“Shiro,” he said. “I need your help.” 

There was no answer. Keith listened to his heart pound in his ears and tried to keep his feet under him. He was about to hail the Green Lion again when a figure appeared out of the dust. Shiro ran toward him, seemingly unaffected by the wind trying to hold him back. He scooped up Krolia’s other arm and threw it over his own shoulder, lifting her up to take the weight off Keith. “Let’s go!” he grunted. 

Krolia’s feet dragged through the sand as the two of them made a mad dash toward the lions. Their huge forms appeared like low, jagged hills. No color was visible through the haze. 

“Which one?” said Shiro. 

The wind gusted and nearly knocked them over. A cantaloupe-sized rock bounced past, just missing Keith’s knee. Something whizzed by Shiro’s face, too fast to identify, too close for comfort. They had to get inside. “Doesn’t matter!” Keith grunted. “There! The one that’s closer!” 

They ran for the hatch and scrambled inside. Keith slammed the door behind them. They lay sprawled on the floor, catching their breath. 

Pidge’s voice came from Keith’s helmet com. “Are you guys okay?”

Keith looked around to see familiar surroundings. His bunk, and Krolia’s. The Altean healing pod in the corner. He told Pidge, “We made it. We’re aboard the Black Lion.” 

“What about your mom?”

Keith crawled to her side. Shiro was with him in an instant. Neither of them was a medic by specialty, but Shiro had training from commanding missions for the Garrison. He gingerly pulled her helmet off and checked her vitals. 

“She seems okay,” he said, disbelieving. “Pretty banged up, obviously, and I don’t know about internal injuries, but…” 

Keith watched his mother’s chest rise and fall. Her face looked serious, with her brows slightly knitted and her mouth a hard line. Her color looked normal. “She once told me that if a Galra is injured, and they don’t die within an hour, then it’s just a matter a time before they recover. I think, now that she’s out of the storm, we just have to wait.” 

Keith hated waiting. 

There was no power to run the healing pod, so they put Krolia in her bed. Keith sat on the edge of his own bed, only meaning to rest for a moment, but as soon as his weight was off his legs the rest of his body collapsed backwards. He groaned as he hit the blankets, but he didn’t try to get back up. 

Shiro sat beside him. “You did it,” he said, beaming down at him. 

Keith only allowed himself to feel the warmth of that smile for a moment or two before cold reality set in again. “We’re still stuck. No food, no water, no power.” Had he saved Krolia just for them all to die in here anyway?

Shiro scooped Keith’s legs up and put him down in his bed the right way around, laughing, “Would you just take the win?”

If this was it for them, then Keith decided he was glad to have Shiro here. 

\-----

The storm whipped itself into a deadly frenzy again and then blew itself out with one last rattling breath. Keith peeked outside after the wind had ceased and Pidge had confirmed that it was safe. It was disorienting to open the door, ready for a barrage of wind and sand, only to be met with still desert air and clean sunlight. He could appreciate the landscape for the first time – a magnificent red plain that fell away into a great valley near the horizon, steep cliffs in the other direction, a distant orange sun alongside the gas giant they were orbiting visible in the sky. 

He opened the Green Lion to find Pidge sitting in near-darkness. She smiled at him wanly. “My lion’s power cut out while you were looking for Krolia,” she explained. “Didn’t have much to begin with. I’m honestly surprised it held out as long as it did.” 

“How do we contact the others?” 

Pidge shook her head. “We don’t. Not unless they happen to wander within range of our helmet coms.” 

“You want to come over?” he said, angling his head toward the Black Lion. 

“Nah,” said Pidge, reaching under her bed and pulling out one of her little puffball pets. “I gotta keep these guys company.” 

Keith returned to the Black Lion and updated Shiro on the situation. They were sitting on the floor, their backs against the hull. Somehow, now that the immediate danger and panic were over, this seemed more neutral than all the bed-sharing they’d been doing lately. Shiro had placed a few battery-powered lights around the hold, but it was still dim in there without the lion’s lighting system active. 

“I feel useless,” Keith muttered as they finished the last of their food and water. There was so little of it, there was no point in rationing. 

“You’ve done all you can,” said Shiro. “Now you have to trust the team.” 

“Yeah,” said Keith, as much to himself as to Shiro. “Pidge might come up with something. Hunk will keep the others safe. Allura has the instincts to adapt to the situation, and Lance could take the initiative to come find us. I just have to be patient.” Keith was terrible at being patient. That’s why Shiro used to have to remind him. 

Shiro smiled and reached over to squeeze Keith’s shoulder. “You’ve got this,” he said.

Keith smiled sadly back and murmured, “I’m not as good at it as you were.”

“You only say that because you think I was doing it all alone,” said Shiro. “You never noticed how much I leaned on you guys. That’s what made me a good leader: I relied on the team. On you most of all. I still do.” 

They’d started out sitting a foot or so apart, but somehow now their shoulders were touching. Keith felt his face grow warm, but he didn’t pull away. 

“It’s like when I was drifting in space,” Shiro continued. “I’d fought so hard and I’d come so close, but I reached a point where there was nothing more I could do. I was sure I was going to die. But I knew that if I had a chance to live, you were it. And you did it. You found me.” 

Shiro was beaming down at him, and Keith wanted nothing more than to bask in that glow. But he was distracted by something he couldn’t ignore. It hadn’t been Shiro he’d found drifting. It had been his clone. “You remember that?” he said before he could stop himself. 

Shiro flinched and the smile disappeared off his face. 

“No, I mean…” Keith stammered. “I’m not saying that you’re… I’m just trying to figure out what happened to you.” 

“So am I,” Shiro muttered. 

“But if you remember it,” Keith probed carefully, “was that you?”

Shiro’s chin dropped to his chest and he closed his eyes in concentration. Before, when Keith had tried to bring it up, he’d just avoided the conversation or refused to answer. But now Keith could see that he _wanted_ to answer, to meet Keith halfway. When he opened his eyes, the best he could come up with was an apologetic, “Sort of.”

“We don’t have to talk about it if you’re not ready,” said Keith. 

Shiro’s shoulders dropped, relieved. “Thank you for understanding,” he said.

Keith shook his head. “I _don’t_ understand,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t stop me from trusting you.”

“Even after…?” Shiro stopped himself, but Keith knew what he’d been about to say. They hadn’t talked about their fight in the cloning facility. Keith hadn’t asked; Shiro hadn’t offered. It was a wound still too raw to touch. Keith wasn’t even sure yet how much of it Shiro remembered, if he remembered it at all. But whether he truly remembered it or not, Shiro knew what had happened there. Keith could tell from the way Shiro’s gaze sometimes slid away from his eyes and down to the scar on his face. 

Keith reached out, his fingertips just grazing Shiro’s jaw to turn his face toward him. When Shiro’s eyes finally flicked up to look at him, Keith said firmly, “I know who you are.”

Shiro smiled and said wryly, but gratefully, “I’m glad one of us does.” 

They sat poised on the precipice of that moment, neither sure which way they would fall, neither willing to pull away first. Until Keith was distracted by a familiar sound: a high-pitched _PAFF_ of displaced air and cosmic energy. 

He turned. His wolf was sitting between his legs and Shiro’s, tail twitching, staring at them quizzically. The last time Keith had seen him, he’d been on the Blue Lion with Allura. And he could only teleport over short distances. 

“They’re here,” Keith said. Then he scrambled to his feet, scooping up his helmet as he went. He shouted into it as he ran for the door. “Pidge! They’re here!” 

All three of them burst out of their lions and into the desert sun just in time to see a magnificent sight. The sand and pebbles on the ground began to vibrate and dance as the rock beneath them quaked. Then the landscape bowed upwards, cracking like pastry as the Yellow Lion burst through the ground in a shower of earth and rose into the still, clear air. Blue and Red followed soon after. Pidge waved her arms and whooped as they came in for a landing. 

There was a round of hugs as the others streamed out of their lions. Shiro managed to wrap both Lance and Allura up with one arm. Hunk picked Pidge up off the ground with a bear hug while she laughed and hung on his shoulders. 

“We’re so happy you’re safe!” said Allura. “When the storm subsided and we still couldn’t contact you, we feared the worst.” 

“How did you find us?” said Keith. 

Hunk gestured excitedly. “We couldn’t pick up a signal from any of you, but we noticed that there was something amplifying _our_ signals in this area, like a communications array with no transponder. There are dozens of nodes spread out in a grid. What did you guys build?”

“The relays!” Pidge gasped. “You picked up on the relays even though they weren’t transmitting anything? Hunk, you’re a genius!”

Lance jerked his thumb at himself and said, “Hey, don’t forget to tell them how it was my idea!”

Allura laughed as she confirmed, “Let the record show that it was Lance who told Hunk to ‘scan for Pidge stuff.’”

With the help of Coran and his stash of faunatonium, Green and Black were soon back in working order. As soon as the power was humming through the Black Lion again, Keith plugged in the healing pod and put Krolia inside. When they moved her, she shifted and groaned and opened one eye with a mumbled, “I’ll be fine, just let me sleep.” 

Keith was pretty sure that “I’ll be fine” for Krolia translated to “If it were anyone else, they’d be dead.” So he gave her hand a squeeze and said, “You can sleep in here. See you soon, mom,” before activating the pod. 

When he went back outside, Lance was exuberantly telling Pidge and Shiro about what they’d been up to while Keith’s group was stuck in the sand. “… and it was completely protected from the storm down there! This cave system must run under the surface of the whole planet, and it’s chock-full of life. I’m talking plants, animals, water, the works! We’re fully re-stocked!” 

Pidge nodded along, her eyes shining. “That’s what’s generating the atmosphere!” she said, punching her own hand excitedly. “All the life on the planet must have moved underground when the weather patterns on the surface became unstable!” 

Lance gestured toward the hole they’d recently punched up through the ground. “You wanna see?” 

The lions rose into the air together and one by one descended through the earth. Keith, relieved to finally be back at the controls of the Black Lion, watched as Red led the way followed by Blue, Yellow, and Green. Once he was sure they were all navigating the descent safely, he followed. 

They passed through a deep, dark tunnel extending vertically into the rock. For a moment they were too deep for the sun to reach them, and Keith could only see by the small circle of illumination cast by his headlights in the tight quarters. Then the bright orange light of the sun above was replaced by a soft green-blue glow from underneath them. The other end of the tunnel was approaching. 

The Black Lion popped out of the claustrophobic cylinder of rock into an amphitheater of light and life. It was as different from the surface as it was possible to be. Only strips of the red bedrock were visible through the dense growth of fluffy algae, long twining vines, living curtains that twisted and draped from the ceiling like leaves of kelp, and bubble-like jellies that gave off a purple bioluminescent glow. Subterranean plant life oozed from every crevice in the rock and hung from every stalactite. Something moved in the pale blue grass below them, and a creature not unlike a huge-eyed rabbit poked its head out of the foliage before it noticed the lions and quickly disappeared again. A great waterfall tumbled down the side of the wall into a sparkling pool below before becoming a river and winding off into other sections of the cave system. 

They landed their lions on a ledge overlooking the magnificent view. Pidge leaped out of the Green Lion and ran straight to the edge, pointing and gesturing while babbling about the fascinating biology of the place. Lance held onto the back of her armor in case she were to fall. Hunk had clearly already figured out which plants were tasty, and was offering Romelle some kind of enormous fruit he’d pulled off a hanging vine. 

Shiro had followed Pidge out of the Green Lion, but instead of joining the fun he leaned against one of Green’s paws and watched. Keith did the same, digging his heels into the plush carpet of green and setting his back against the Black Lion. Shiro looked happy as he watched the paladins and their friends enjoy the wonderland they had found. Then he turned and caught Keith watching him. His smile flickered, then grew. 

That smile was enough. Ever since Kerberos, they’d been caught up in a non-stop whirlwind of war, danger, and confusion. Every time things seemed to slow down, some new complication would kick them back into a frenzy. Always on the verge of death, or separation, or betrayal. Barely holding onto each other through it all. It was enough that they’d survived. That they were together. It was enough, for now, that Shiro was happy and safe. 

Keith could wait.

There would be time to find each other after the storm had passed.


End file.
